mediacenter

The Boxee blog has recently announced that they have finally released a Linux version. So far, only Ubuntu 7.10 through 8.04 support is available. We covered Boxee when they released their alpha version a few months ago. One of the unique things we found about it was the added social layer that allows the user to share their viewing and listening information on various social networking sites.

This XBMC based media streamer has won a lot of praise lately and we are excited to finally see it step into the Linux platform. Up until now, Boxee was strictly run on OSX 10.5 and thus bound to Apple’s hardware configurations. Once they get a stable version running, it will be extremely easy for anyone to build a media streamer from an old PC with various hardware configurations.

We were just as excited as anyone when we heard about Roku’s Linux based Netflix Player, but not being ones to spend money on hardware, even $99, we’d much rather use something that’s laying around that’s not living up to its full potential. Lifehacker has a guide for using vmcNetflix to stream Watch Instantly movies to the Xbox 360. vmcNetflix is a Media Center plugin. When the 360 was originally released, you could only get Media Center by buying a new PC, now it’s included with Vista, meaning people might actually use it.

Boxee is the latest piece of software to enter the home theater PC space. It’s recently become available as a public alpha. The first build is only for OSX 10.5, but Ubuntu is coming. Built on the XBMC code base-they even hosted the XBMC developer con last weekend-it has the same goal of letting you navigate and watch/listen to all of your media from your using just a remote. There’s more than just that though.